MALTA
The Associated Press
October 9, 2018
The pope’s summit early next year on preventing sex abuse should also address holding bishops accountable when they fail to protect their flocks from paedophile priests, the Vatican’s leading sex abuse expert said Monday.
Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna said the February summit of global church leaders is the appropriate venue for discussing “a great expectation for more accountability” among Catholic faithful worldwide.
The Vatican said last month that Pope Francis had summoned the presidents of the estimated 130 Catholic bishops’ conferences to a Feb. 21-24 meeting to discuss the “protection of minors.” The announcement was made as clergy sex abuse revelations and cover-up allegations on several continents fuelled a scandal that now threatens Francis’ papacy.
Scicluna, who for a decade was the Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, has long acknowledged the need for bishops to be punished if they covered up for predators.
Abuse survivors and their advocates accuse the Vatican of turning a blind eye when bishops moved priests who were suspected of or known for misconduct from parish to parish instead of reporting them to police or sanctioning them canonically.
While hundreds of priests have been defrocked over the years for raping and molesting minors, only a few bishops have faced sanctions for failing to prevent such crimes.
Francis has had a steep and difficult learning curve on the issue of complicity and culpability. He was excoriated earlier this year for having defended a Chilean bishop accused of witnessing and ignoring abuse by Chile’s most notorious predator priest.
The pope eventually did an about face and acknowledged “errors in judgment,” vowing that bishops would no longer be shielded from questions about how they responded to allegations against priests in their dioceses.
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